Yesterday we brought you the story that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had been breached by a member of Anonymous for airing a controversial interview on Lateline that, the hacker claimed, spread an anti-Islamic message. After forum usernames and other details were leaked online yesterday, the ABC has since conducted an investigation and found that no official ABC property was actually hacked. So where did the information come from?
The ABC did in fact confirm the hack, saying that it was from an ABC forum, but not one that the ABC controlled itself.
It turns out that the data came from an external forum commissioned but not maintained by the ABC. The data came from the website of a hacked television program called Making Australia Happy.
The statement from Aunty reads as so:
Making Australia Happy is an external website and does not sit on the ABC Information Technology infrastructure. This means that the ABC’s core servers and systems are not affected.
The ABC has contacted the registered audience members of Making Australia Happy website which has now been shut down.
The ABC has strongly advised those people to change their passwords on any other online or digital services if there is a risk that they have used the same password as the one they used on the Making Australia Happy website.
The ABC is continuing to provide as much information as possible to these affected audience members to assist them to manage their online security.
The ABC is taking immediate steps to check all of our external websites that are developed and hosted outside of the ABC to assess security.
This will include confirming with external partners their security practises and technologies. Meanwhile the ongoing monitoring of our internal ABC systems continues in order to strengthen our defences against future cyber-attacks.
The ABC is in touch with external security agencies to ensure we are doing everything possible to prevent further breaches.